Tag: Everyday life

“In Georgian London: Into the Streets, Lucy Inglis takes readers on a tour of London’s most formative age—the age of love, sex, intellect, art, great ambition, and fantastic ruin. Travel back to the Georgian years, a time that changed expectations of what life could be. Peek into the gilded drawing rooms of the aristocracy, walk down the quiet avenues of the new middle class, and crouch in the damp doorways of the poor. But watch your wallet—tourists make perfect prey for the thriving community of hawkers, prostitutes, and scavengers. Visit the madhouses of Hackney, the workshops of Soho, and the mean streets of Cheapside. Have a coffee in the city, check the stock exchange, and pop into St Paul’s to see progress on the new dome. This book is about the Georgians who called London their home, from dukes and artists to rent boys and hot air balloonists meeting dog-nappers and life-models along the way. It investigates the legacies they left us in architecture and art, science, and society, and shows the making of the capital millions know and love today.” (Amazon blurb)

Honestly, I love this kind of book. It’s meat and drink for me as a novelist. Often when I’m writing it’s the nit and grit of everyday life that’s needed to make a period come alive. I’ve no plans right now to write a novel set in Georgian London but, as a die-hard Georgette Heyer fan, I don’t want to rule it out. If I just happened to have this book on my bookshelves, who knows what might happen 😉

For The Road to Newgate, these two books in a similar vein were brilliant for writing about the 17th Century: